This morning at Salesforce.com's World Tour event in New York city, I meet with Mike Stone, SVP Chatter Marketing to talk about Salesforce.com's messaging around enterprise collaboration. I mentioned to Mike that if you look back over the last few years, Salesforce.com used to put a lot of emphasis on social business and specifically the Chatter brand, however now both terms have faded from Salesforce.com's marketing. Case in point, out of 16 sessions on today's agenda the word Chatter only appears once.
Mike's response, "Chatter is the social heart of Salesforce1."
I could not agree more. Rather than talk specifically about collaboration or "being social", Salesforce is now focusing on their core business solutions of Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and HR. Chatter, and the collaboration features it provides, are integrated directly into those solutions. Those solutions, along with custom applications sit on top of Salesforce1, Salesforce.com's platform as a service infrastructure. Yes, Chatter is still available as a stand-alone enterprise social network (in both free and paid versions) but its benefits are greater when collaboration is used within the content of one of Salesforce's business solutions. This type of integration is what I refer to as Purposeful Collaboration.
That's not to say Salesforce is not continuing to improve Chatter. Quite the contrary, actually. Areas such as files and communities are currently getting major attention, and latter in 2014 I expect to see enhancements and additions to areas like content creation and unified communication.
In the Constellation Research report, Salesforce Chatter: The Collaborative Foundation of Salesforce1 we provide details and competitive comparisons around the following five Chatter strengths:
1. Purposeful collaboration across multiple lines of business
2. Feature-rich file sharing capabilities
3. Customized post types enable work to be done in context
4. Recommendations to help you find expertise
5. Massive partner ecosystem emerging around Salesforce1
And weaknesses:
1. No long form content creation
2. No integrated web-conferencing or video chat
3. No advanced stream filtering
4. Unclear roadmap for social task management
5. Missing some key integrations
If your organization is currently using Salesforce or considering becoming a customer, this report provides information and advice that will be useful to you.